Reza Goljani Amirkhiz
Monitoring the impact of climate change on the abundance and distribution of breeding bird communities
Abstract
To effectively understand and manage the responses of bird communities to climate change, it is important to consider complex interspecific interactions, niche specialization, and the advantages and vulnerabilities of varied life histories. Incorporating these features requires multi-species approaches that follow monitoring of avian community responses to climate change with multi-species modeling techniques to support landscape- and ecosystem-level rather than single-species conservation management decisions. The overarching goal of this project is to expand tools for multispecies conservation management decisions by considering monitoring detection errors, species interactions, phylogenetic relationships, and remotely sensed environmental variables. I will develop an optimum modeling framework balancing estimation accuracy and computational cost to predict the responses to climate change of bird communities in the alpine ecosystems of California. I will work with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) and the California Biodiversity Network to apply this modeling framework to analysis in their flagship Climate-Biodiversity Sentinel Site Network, an emerging, long-term, and statewide monitoring effort.
Mentors
Dr. Erika Zavaleta at University of California, Santa Cruz and Dr. Dena Spatz at California Department of Fish and Wildlife and Pacific Rim Conservation
Undergraduate Education
B.S. in Natural Resources Engineering, Tehran University, Tehran, Iran, 2005
Graduate Education
Ph.D. in Biological Science, University of South Dakota, SD, 2023
M.S. in Wildlife Science and a Minor in Applied Statistics, New Mexico State University, NM, 2017
M.S. in Natural Resources Engineering- Biodiversity and Habitat, Azad, University, Science and Research Branch, Tehran, Iran, 2009
